From the get-go, one can’t help but feel attracted to Sulu (Vidya Balan), a quirky, happy-go-lucky housewife who has a natural talent of winning oddball competitions. One day Sulu wins a pressure cooker on a radio show and ends up mesmerising the head of the radio network with her sultry voice — a talent neither she, nor her husband (nor the audience) knew she had.

As the poster of Tumhari Sulu shows, she gets her own radio show. What it doesn’t show is how enjoyable and unpretentious that journey is.

Every small aspect of Tumhari Sulu is finely tuned, which makes the director even more of a star than Vidya Balan

Director/writer Suresh Triveni sets the bar pretty high in simple storytelling. Triveni takes away clichéd adornments — the over-dramatics and routineness — and replaces them with a splash of ordinary quirks. Sulu’s family — which includes a passive-minded, supporting husband (Manav Kaul) and an eleven-year old boy — sing and dance like normal, happy folk, and yet at the same time exhibit a filmic unnaturalness. This slight tweak by Triveni cements the fact that Tumhari Sulu is a motion picture, no matter how accurately it depicts real life.

Vidya Balan, of course, is mesmerising as she takes charge in the acting department with excellent support from Neha Dhupia and Kaul. Triveni, however, is the show-runner here. Every small aspect of Sulu, technical or creative, is finely tuned. Scenes are short, to the point, and shot with just the right zest. The upshot of this exercise helps maintain a relatively acceptable run time of under two hours (which, frankly speaking, is just enough to wholeheartedly enjoy a film these days).

Published in Dawn, ICON, December 3rd, 2017